Friday, June 2, 2023
Reconsidering corporal punishment
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Hell and conditional prophecy
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Capital punishment and the law of nations
Monday, May 8, 2023
Substance, teleology, and intentionality
Tuesday, May 2, 2023
A Festschrift for Gyula Klima
Saturday, April 29, 2023
The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism
Thursday, April 13, 2023
What is a Law of Nature?
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
All One in Christ on EWTN Live
Thursday, April 6, 2023
Talking philosophy and natural theology
Wednesday, April 5, 2023
Strawson on free will and interpersonal relationships
Saturday, April 1, 2023
All One in Christ on Bookmark Brief
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
McCaig and Reilly on All One in Christ
A devastating critique of CRT and a
clear Catholic response to the evils of racism. A real eye-opener! The incompatibility of CRT with the Faith, its
numerous logical errors, and it’s deeper entrenching of racism into societal
fabric could not be clearer. Please read.
In the
Winter issue of the Claremont Review of
Books, Robert R. Reilly kindly reviews
the book. From the review:
Feser’s [book] is an important rejoinder, delivered in an accessible way for a wide audience, not just specialists and Catholics…
The philosophy of capital punishment
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Putnam on reason, reductionism, and relativism
Saturday, March 18, 2023
How to define “wokeness”
Friday, March 10, 2023
This month at First Things
Friday, March 3, 2023
Naturalism versus Katz’s Platonism
Sunday, February 26, 2023
Open thread combox
Here’s the latest open thread, by popular demand. Actually, it was one guy, but I’ll bet there at least twice as many as that who are interested. From quantum logic to Quantumania, MacArthur at Inchon to Thomas Pynchon, Muay Thai to Jamiroquai, everything’s on topic. Just keep it civil and classy. Earlier open threads archived here.
Friday, February 24, 2023
Catholicism, CRT, and the spirit of the age
Saturday, February 18, 2023
Pope Francis contra life imprisonment
Friday, February 10, 2023
The Faith Once for All Delivered
Talking about All One in Christ
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
An anonymous saint?
Thursday, February 2, 2023
Avicenna on non-contradiction
We’ve been talking about the law of non-contradiction (LNC), which says that the statements p and not-p cannot both be true. (In symbolic notation: ~ (p • ~p) ) We briefly noted Aristotle’s view that skepticism about LNC cannot be made a coherent position. Let’s now consider a famous remark on the subject by the Islamic philosopher Avicenna or Ibn Sina (c. 970-1037). In The Metaphysics of the Healing, he says of such a skeptic:
As for the obstinate, he must be plunged into fire, since fire and non-fire are identical. Let him be beaten, since suffering and not suffering are the same. Let him be deprived of food and drink, since eating and drinking are identical to abstaining. (Quoted in the SEP article “Contradiction”)
Friday, January 27, 2023
Quantum mechanics and the laws of thought
The laws of
thought are three:
1. The law
of non-contradiction (LNC), which states that the statements p and not-p cannot both be true. In
symbolic notation: ~ (p • ~p)
2. The law
of identity, which says that everything is identical with itself. In symbolic notation, a = a
3. The law of excluded middle (LEM), which states that either p or not-p is true. In symbolic notation: p V ~p
Friday, January 20, 2023
Cartwright on theory and experiment in science
Saturday, January 14, 2023
Benedict XVI, Cardinal Pell, and criticism of Pope Francis
In the wake of the deaths of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell, it has emerged that each of them raised serious criticisms of aspects of Pope Francis’s teaching and governance of the Church. How might the pope respond to these criticisms? As I have explained elsewhere, the Church explicitly teaches that even popes can under certain circumstances respectfully be criticized by the faithful. Moreover, Pope Francis himself has explicitly said on several occasions that he welcomes criticism. It seems clear that the criticisms raised by Benedict and Pell are precisely the kind that the pope should take the most seriously, given the teaching of the Church and his own views about the value of criticism.
Saturday, January 7, 2023
More about All One in Christ
Monday, January 2, 2023
Koons on Aristotle and quantum mechanics
Sunday, January 1, 2023
The wages of gin
My review of Jane Peyton’s The Philosophy of Gin appears in the Christmas 2022 issue of The Lamp magazine.
Saturday, December 31, 2022
On the death of Pope Benedict XVI
Friday, December 23, 2022
Why did the Incarnation occur precisely when it did?
Saturday, December 17, 2022
When do popes teach infallibly?
Thursday, December 8, 2022
Is God’s existence a “hypothesis”?
Thursday, December 1, 2022
Davies on classical theism and divine freedom
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Augustine on divine punishment of the good alongside the wicked
Tuesday, November 22, 2022
Update on All One in Christ
This book is perfectly subtitled in that it spends significant time evaluating both the church’s denunciation of racism and the incompatibility of Church teaching with CRT… Readers who seek a thorough overview of the church’s statements and position on racism will find it here, and Christians who have ever experienced confusion as to whether CRT obtains as a remedy for it will come away with the understanding that Christianity and critical race theory rest on entirely different first principles; indeed, they present irreconcilable worldviews…
Thursday, November 10, 2022
Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part VII: The influence of Kant
Immanuel Kant was, of course, not an atheist. So why devote an entry to him in this series, thereby lumping him in with the likes of Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Marx, Woody Allen, and Schopenhauer? In part because Kant’s philosophy, I would suggest, inadvertently did more to bolster atheism than any other modern system, Hume’s included. He was, as Nietzsche put it, a “catastrophic spider” (albeit not for the reasons Nietzsche supposed). But also in part because, like the other thinkers in this series, Kant had a more subtle and interesting attitude about religion than contemporary critics of traditional theology like the New Atheists do.
Friday, November 4, 2022
All One in Christ at Beliefnet
Earlier reviews of and interviews about the book can be found here and here.